I have thought for a long time that the way my clothes hang on me is more important than me inside them.

Ali Smith

Categorized in : Long Important Clothes

Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn’t there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google.

google promise needs

But everything written has style. The list of ingredients on the side of a cornflakes box has style. And everything literary has literary style. And style is integral to a work. How something is told correlates with - more - makes what's being told. A story is its style.

ingredients style lists

I'm blessed in my good friends, and some of them happen to be writers, though that's almost never what our friendships are about. And every writer I've ever read, living or dead, has in one way or another helped and inspired. I have a feeling it's important not to mix the two up.

good-friend blessed two

The whole point is, we can forget. It’s important that we forget some things. Otherwise we’d go round the world carrying a hodload of stuff we just don’t need.

important world needs

[Property] is a brilliant, chillingly revelatory piece of fiction, a work of craft, economy and such good merciless observation-one of those rare, crucial novels illuminating a history we think we know and understand so that after we've read it we'll never forget its truths.

pieces fiction thinking

Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship, and that almost never stops literature going where it wants to go either, because literature has a way of surpassing everything that blocks it and growing stronger for the exercise.

growing-stronger block exercise

We're well past the end of the century when time, for the first time, curved, bent, slipped, flash forwarded, and flashed back yet still kept rolling along. We know it all now, with our thoughts traveling at the speed of a tweet, our 140 characters in search of a paragraph. We're post-history. We're post-mystery.

rolling-along character past

I want to be bored. But I can't. But I really don't want to be this thing that I'm having to be instead of being bored.

being-bored bored want

Thomas Teal, a luminous translator of Jansson's twin talent for surface and depth, simplicity and reverberation in language, and someone who knows exactly how to convey her gift for sensing the meaning embedded in the most mundane act or turn of phrase.

simplicity phrases depth

The proper word for me," Robin Goodman says, "is me. by Ali Smith

The proper word for me," Robin Goodman says, "is me.

goodman robins

Even things which seem separate and finished are infinitely connected and will infinitely connect. This connection happens as soon as you let it, as soon as you engage - as soon as you even attempt to engage.

connections connected happens

And it was always the stories that needed the telling that gave us the rope we could cross any river with. They balanced us high above any crevasse. They made us be natural acrobats. They made us brave. They met us well. They changed us. It was in their nature to.

rope brave rivers

Tonight I can smell the season the way it's usually only possible to at the very first moments of its return, before you're used to it, when you've forgotten its smell, then there it is back in the air and the flow of things shifting and resettling again.

smell tonight air

Outside the leaves on the trees constricted slightly; they were the deep done green of the beginning of autumn. It was a Sunday in September. There would only be four. The clouds were high and the swallows would be here for another month or so before they left for the south before they returned again next summer.

autumn sunday summer

remember you must live. remember you most love. remainder you mis... by Ali Smith

remember you must live. remember you most love. remainder you mist leaf.

mist remembers-you remember-you

I don't want a tombstone. You could carve on it 'She never actual... by Ali Smith

I don't want a tombstone. You could carve on it 'She never actually wanted a tombstone.'

headstone tombstone want

The head has its confines. The head’s got those all right, and the heart. The heart has its reasons.

reason heart

Then I saw her smile so close to my eye that there was nothing to see but the smile and the thought came into my head that I’d never been inside a smile before. Who’d have thought being inside a smile would be so ancient and so modern both at once

saws eye would-be

All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where th... by Ali Smith

All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.

eye broken might

It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know.

important stories knows